MIT Hyperloop Team Ready For The SpaceX January Weekend Competition

When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk challenged the world to create the future of transportation, 28 students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology answered. And this weekend, they are heading to California with their own concept of the Hyperloop pod as one of the thirty teams entering the second round.

Elon Musk's Hyperloop concept focuses on a high-speed transportation concept that involves people riding a system of vacuum based tubes that connects passengers from city A to city B in half or less than the amount of time required.

The on-track competition is already happening this weekend until Jan. 29, as reported by ECN Mag. The design competition already happened last January 2016 and this weekend competition is the testing phase. The final competition is happening this summer. The MIT Hyperloop team was previously awarded Best Overall Design during the design competition. They took the spot out of 115 entries from different university teams. The 28 members on the team all come from different disciplines such as business management, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and aeronautics.

What makes the MIT Hyperloop team's pod different from the rest? They use a magnetic levitation system that uses 20 neodymium magnets, as reported by MIT Hyperloop. Upon lift off, the pod will levitate on a 15mm gap. The team also designed a lift suspension system that reduces vibration. Their braking system has a mechanical fail-safe braking system. The specific design enables the pod to brake automatically if the computers fail. There are more than 400 magnets and can decelerate the pod at the 2.4G maximum permitted under SpaceX rules.

Aside from MIT Hyperloop team's own unveiling, other teams and universities are also unveiling their designs. Teslarati features University of Wisconsin-Madison's BadgerLoop team. The BadgerLoop team won the Pod Excellence Award last year which qualified them for the January competition.